Site Navigation

Site Mobile Navigation

Clicking and Choosing

During the presidential election, YouTube turned from a hectic mosaic of weird video clips to a first-stop source for political everything. Every gotcha moment, spoof, pundit’s musing, TV clip, campaign speech, formal ad and handmade polemic cropped up there. Star posters like Brave New Films, Barely Political and Talking Points Memo TV emerged; they cranked out parody and propaganda much faster than the campaigns themselves. Was YouTube just a new place to envision an election that would have gone the same way without it? Or does the unpredictable new form of online video carry its own ideology — a new message to go with a new medium?

YouTube didn’t exist in 2004. It started up the next year. As Steve Grove, YouTube’s head of news and politics, points out, the 2008 presidential election was the site’s first shot at wielding influence in national politics. Sure, videos of senators dozing through hearings had always been popular on the site — and some observers even cited YouTube’s gotcha videos for helping defeat the senators George Allen and Conrad Burns in the 2006 midterm elections. But YouTube wanted to do more than create mischief. The brass at the site jumped at the chance to grow up by seriously engaging voters, candidates and the mainstream media.

As MTV had done, YouTube first presented itself as a way for candidates to connect with “the youth vote.” In the end, the site wound up profoundly affecting the popular perception of candidates across demographics. It showed that a video of 37 minutes — the length of Barack Obama’s March speech on race — was not too long to attract more than five million views. It showed that nearly all the foot soldiers for a candidate need skills with digital technology — as editing and uploading video is now more important to a campaign than direct mail. And it showed that offhand jokes — think McCain’s “bomb Iran” Beach Boys routine — can be disastrous. It’s better for a candidate in the YouTube age to speak feelingly from lecterns and let voters respond chiefly to his rhetorical strategies.

In 2006, YouTube’s political team came up with the idea of YouChoose, a section of the site devoted to showing videos from candidates; it began in February the next year. At first, says a spokesman for YouTube, some politicians feared that the site could only burn them with Allen-like “macaca” moments. But eventually 7 of 16 people who ran for the presidency announced their candidacies on YouTube. And as the campaign season wore on, many candidates learned to turn the site’s idiosyncrasies to their advantage. They uploaded ads and permitted freewheeling — sometimes ferocious — discussion of them. Recognizing that glasnost is the key to acceptance among YouTube users, candidates virtually forfeited control over the context of their videos and allowed them to be embedded, critiqued, recut and satirized.

Some candidates also discovered, to their surprise, that they could upload vanity videos (or ones that seemed fairly parody-proof) and supporters would circulate them on social networks, amateurs would use them to make ads and they would get influential, focused advertising for nothing. Early on, the musician will.i.am used film of an Obama speech to make his “Yes We Can” music video. That video, in multiple versions, has become the most-watched political entry on the site, having been seen around 15 million times. (The campaign’s upload of the actual “Yes We Can” speech has fewer than two million views.)

In the end, all the candidates opened YouTube accounts and together uploaded thousands of videos. (John McCain’s channel now shows 330 videos; Barack Obama’s shows 1,821.) Even after an unaffiliated user called ParkRidge47 created “Vote Different,” which acidly satirized Clinton’s “Hillcast” videos, the Clinton campaign kept uploading shorts, including a spoof of “The Sopranos” that won her points for sophistication and brazenness. The BarackObamadotcom account uploaded more than 150 videos during the campaign’s final days, including a personal appeal by Obama’s sister, Maya Soetoro-Ng, and another by Ethel Kennedy and her son Max.

Photo

Credit
Kevin Van Aelst

Grove, who worked at The Boston Globe and ABC News before going to YouTube, was part of the company’s political team that met with almost every candidate at the start of the campaign season. They made YouTube available to the candidates and encouraged them to start channels on YouChoose that would allow viewers to contribute money directly to campaigns via Google Checkout. Some campaigns, like Ralph Nader’s, which featured a video of the candidate talking to a parrot, and Mike Gravel’s, which was defined by a strange art film that could have been made by Lars von Trier, seemed to exist almost entirely on YouTube.

While some more-mainstream campaigns felt bruised by the conventions of the site — in an interview with Grove, John McCain jokingly referred to YouTube as “my sworn enemy” and expressed regret that several videos turned his “bomb Iran” quip into an earnest statement of policy — others savored the chance to talk to the electorate, talk back to the electorate, spin, campaign and upload video.

YouTube signed on as a partner for two CNN-YouTube presidential debates, at which select YouTube users had their questions for the candidates of both parties broadcast and answered on CNN. YouTube also stayed close to the Iowa caucus, the New Hampshire and Pennsylvania primaries and Super Tuesday, creating programs to allow voters to upload video that would give a sense of primary voting in their state.

An error has occurred. Please try again later.

You are already subscribed to this email.

What YouTube can do with these and all its other videos — how it might make money from them — is another question. But then, with advertising seeming to dry up on TV and in print media, mainstream outlets have despaired at making money off even the most captive audiences. The story of YouTube, so far, is not necessarily the story of the business of the future; it’s too strange a place and too uncertain a profit model to inspire copycats. As a minicivilization, though — with heroes and villains and mores and bylaws — YouTube is a fascinating place. In 2008, a group of dogged politicos climbed its hierarchy. They created some videos that glorified the persona of the orator, and others that censured anyone playful or reckless enough to sing about bombing Iran. As he was in the election, the big winner on YouTube was Barack Obama.

BRAVENEWFILMS: This liberal channel, run by Robert Greenwald, recontextualizes gotcha video and breaks stories into the mainstream. The propagandists give away their schemes here: youtube.com/watch?v=4DIIa_ejjjU

RONPAUL2008DOTCOM: The most-viewed and most-subscribed campaign channel on the YouChoose platform for several months. Ron Paul found an online constituency and kept them inspired. youtube.com/user/ronpaul2008dotcom

EMERGENCY CHEESE: The dorm-room video blogger James Kotecki gave free advice to candidates on how to handle YouTube until Politico hired him, and a professional pundit was made. politico.com/kotecki/

TPMTV: “CNN Laughs It Up Over Sarah Palin Interview” showed Wolf Blitzer praising Tina Fey’s impression of Sarah Palin. It got more than three million views. Viewers felt as if they had caught it on CNN instead of having it fed to them by TPMtv, the liberal channel. TPMtv’s Election Day in 100 seconds: youtube.com/watch?v=3oVQ7EsKVeE

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page MM22 of the Sunday Magazine with the headline: THE WAY WE LIVE NOW: 11-16-08: Clicking and Choosing. Today's Paper|Subscribe